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I wrote this originally to put at the end of the stacked vs. unstacked debate, but that thread is just to long and I figured it would be burried there, so I decided to put it in its own thread. Sorry this is kinda long, but I think it is well worth it.
--GK
War in Civ4
Believe it or not, I actually went and read through the whole thread prior to writing and posting this. This is my idea of what I would like to see for combat.
Stacked is the way to go. How the stacks work is what we need to decide.
We should get rid of individual units all together.
Yep. That’s right. Get rid of them. Instead of having cities build only one thing, city improvements or military units, let them only and always build city improvements. Of course, we would need to double or triple the number of improvements, but that is for a different thread.
CITIES -
Each city has an automatic set of defenders. Each city has a percentage of its production/money INDIVIDUALLY (per city) adjusted to maintain the costs. This is the equivalent to the National Guard, armed police, etc. along with local militias that may be called up in times of emergency. Your inner cities will probably spend just enough to maintain civil order, while your outer cities next to friendly states a little more, and finally those adjacent to the enemy will spend lots. This would work similar to how I have forts below.
FORTS -
Your workers get to build fortresses and these also automatically get filled. They are paid for out of the national treasury. Each fort can have itself set as to its condition (as well as determining how much it costs to maintain). Also, each fort has to be upgraded (much like units now are upgraded from warrior, sword, mace, etc.). So, as you advance in tech, you can upgrade that moat and bailey into a keep, then to a castle, etc.
So, you build a moat and bailey on your border with the French. Recognizing that they are going to attack, you upgrade your fort from Standard alertness (5hp) to Ready alertness (10hp). You also spend the 150 gold to upgrade it into a Keep, which takes 1-5 turns to complete. After your little border skirmish, you soundly defeat the French and your boarder is now further away. Not wanting to pay for the full upkeep, you lower its status to Mothballed (1hp). In essence, you have a small force there keeping it in repair, but little more. Eventually, you realize that with how technology has advanced, you would spend far too much upgrading it to be effective and you set its status to be Abandoned, costing you nothing in maintenance, but its . Just thinking about it, there should be five levels of readiness – 0= abandoned (0hp), 4 = full alert (10hp). This represents the number of men within the fort as well as how far its radius of control is.
ARMIES –
Mobil units are recruited from the national pool. You can recruit several sizes of armies, depending on what you want to pay, your tech, and so forth. You enter your “National Military Management” Screen, click on “Create an Army” and go from there. First, you pick a spot on the map for your new units HQ. If it is inside your territory good, as this is where your army will be getting its supplies from, replacements from, etc. If outside your territory, well, I am getting ahead of myself. Just note, you can move your army HQ around. It moves just like a current unit moves in civ3. Your army itself comes into being around your HQ. Again, it takes time. Depends on the number of armies you are trying to make at once, the population of your land, your government type, your manufacturing capabilities (you have to have smiths to make all those swords and armor, and you have to have foundries and auto plants to make tanks and jeeps). Or, you can purchase the materials.
The size of the army you get to determine. You can make corps, brigades, divisions, legions, etc. Down to say company size. Smaller sized units can be combined, and larger size units can be split. This gives control to those who want it, and helps take it away from those who don’t. Balancing will have to take place however to make this system work right. You get a bonus for attacking a smaller sized unit with a larger one, and you get a minus for having two small size units attacking a target (missed communications).
Each army has several factors or components that make it up. Once the army is made, these cannot be changed easily or quickly (or cheaply). I would say we need the following:
-Attack - the offensive might of the unit – all types of arms combined, swords, rifles, catapults, howitzers, etc).
-Range - the effective distance your army can reach. A higher number here indicates either more advance technology (sword – 3 feet; rifle – couple hundred) or a higher concentration of artillery. Artillery costs more, and is also more susceptible to counterattack, and is slow. However, it can do oh so much damage.
-Defense – how well your army can take damage. Peasants have cloth. Knights have armor. Tanks have even more armor. You get the point.
-Hit Points – in reality, this represents the number of men and their health. Bigger armies have more HP. Armies without their maximum number of HP have taken damage (either budget wise, did you forget to sign that pay check) or have recently encountered something that it didn’t like (hmm, sent that legion against that keep, the keep fell, but the legion wasn’t worth much after the fact).
-Mobility – how fast they move. Foot, horse, jeep. The faster it moves, the more it cost to maintain.
-Engineering – its ability to cross rivers quickly, lay sieges, and help out your workers in building forts, roads, and other things that need to be done. Engineering costs LOTS of money, but is well worth it. The bigger the number, the more specialists you have, the more things you can do.
-Scouting – this is the ability of your army to accurately detect threats and to assess the enemy. Any yahoo can see that the enemy has a castle up there on the mountain. But a trained scout can tell you that it is either abandoned or that its defenders are in a high state of readiness. Also, is that a company, division or brigade that we are coming up against in those woods?
This gives amazing combinations. You can create an army of fast movers. Good on attack and defense, average on scouting, low on engineering and range, and Excellent in mobility. In ancient times, this would be your horsemen. As your technology progresses, the army upgrades and is now knights. Later on, they trade in their armor and swords for carbines and sabers. Then, even later, they trade up to either helo’s or tanks.
Naval units – well, I am not sure about how this would work. Either something similar to the current method or some hybrid. I don’t know. I have been thinking mostly along the lines of land warfare.
You have two lines. One connects your HQ to your capitol (or, as I would like to see, your state or province capitol that it is assigned to – although this is a different topic really). The next connects your HQ to your army. Each line is a supply and communications line. In order to remove the necessities of extra micromanagement, you can assume that the line has defenders appropriate to the size of the force it is serving. A company has far less than a brigade. However, there are blips that move along these lines that the enemy can intercept. So be warned. You loose your supply wagons, your army is gonna hurt. Or, possibly even worse, you can send information to your enemy about your unit strengths, damage, and so forth. Painful.
The further your HQ line from the capitol, the longer it takes orders to be done (NO MORE INSTANT GRATIFICATION). The longer the HQ line to the army, the longer it takes to get re-supply and the worse your army performs in the field. IF the HQ is attacked and lost (to everybody but yourself, it appears to be just another military unit, if they can see it at all), your army basically just sits there without re-supply until you can build a new one and assign the army to it, and then rebuild the communications lines. Long, expensive, and painful, particularly if your army is in enemy territory.
OK. That is the rough seed for my idea. It guts how things work now but it puts it back into that “epic” scale that we all think Civ should have, while still retaining the ability to micromanage how things work (if you want) as well as allowing for more detailed and realistic warfare. Thanks for reading.
-GK
--GK
War in Civ4
Believe it or not, I actually went and read through the whole thread prior to writing and posting this. This is my idea of what I would like to see for combat.
Stacked is the way to go. How the stacks work is what we need to decide.
We should get rid of individual units all together.
Yep. That’s right. Get rid of them. Instead of having cities build only one thing, city improvements or military units, let them only and always build city improvements. Of course, we would need to double or triple the number of improvements, but that is for a different thread.
CITIES -
Each city has an automatic set of defenders. Each city has a percentage of its production/money INDIVIDUALLY (per city) adjusted to maintain the costs. This is the equivalent to the National Guard, armed police, etc. along with local militias that may be called up in times of emergency. Your inner cities will probably spend just enough to maintain civil order, while your outer cities next to friendly states a little more, and finally those adjacent to the enemy will spend lots. This would work similar to how I have forts below.
FORTS -
Your workers get to build fortresses and these also automatically get filled. They are paid for out of the national treasury. Each fort can have itself set as to its condition (as well as determining how much it costs to maintain). Also, each fort has to be upgraded (much like units now are upgraded from warrior, sword, mace, etc.). So, as you advance in tech, you can upgrade that moat and bailey into a keep, then to a castle, etc.
So, you build a moat and bailey on your border with the French. Recognizing that they are going to attack, you upgrade your fort from Standard alertness (5hp) to Ready alertness (10hp). You also spend the 150 gold to upgrade it into a Keep, which takes 1-5 turns to complete. After your little border skirmish, you soundly defeat the French and your boarder is now further away. Not wanting to pay for the full upkeep, you lower its status to Mothballed (1hp). In essence, you have a small force there keeping it in repair, but little more. Eventually, you realize that with how technology has advanced, you would spend far too much upgrading it to be effective and you set its status to be Abandoned, costing you nothing in maintenance, but its . Just thinking about it, there should be five levels of readiness – 0= abandoned (0hp), 4 = full alert (10hp). This represents the number of men within the fort as well as how far its radius of control is.
ARMIES –
Mobil units are recruited from the national pool. You can recruit several sizes of armies, depending on what you want to pay, your tech, and so forth. You enter your “National Military Management” Screen, click on “Create an Army” and go from there. First, you pick a spot on the map for your new units HQ. If it is inside your territory good, as this is where your army will be getting its supplies from, replacements from, etc. If outside your territory, well, I am getting ahead of myself. Just note, you can move your army HQ around. It moves just like a current unit moves in civ3. Your army itself comes into being around your HQ. Again, it takes time. Depends on the number of armies you are trying to make at once, the population of your land, your government type, your manufacturing capabilities (you have to have smiths to make all those swords and armor, and you have to have foundries and auto plants to make tanks and jeeps). Or, you can purchase the materials.
The size of the army you get to determine. You can make corps, brigades, divisions, legions, etc. Down to say company size. Smaller sized units can be combined, and larger size units can be split. This gives control to those who want it, and helps take it away from those who don’t. Balancing will have to take place however to make this system work right. You get a bonus for attacking a smaller sized unit with a larger one, and you get a minus for having two small size units attacking a target (missed communications).
Each army has several factors or components that make it up. Once the army is made, these cannot be changed easily or quickly (or cheaply). I would say we need the following:
-Attack - the offensive might of the unit – all types of arms combined, swords, rifles, catapults, howitzers, etc).
-Range - the effective distance your army can reach. A higher number here indicates either more advance technology (sword – 3 feet; rifle – couple hundred) or a higher concentration of artillery. Artillery costs more, and is also more susceptible to counterattack, and is slow. However, it can do oh so much damage.
-Defense – how well your army can take damage. Peasants have cloth. Knights have armor. Tanks have even more armor. You get the point.
-Hit Points – in reality, this represents the number of men and their health. Bigger armies have more HP. Armies without their maximum number of HP have taken damage (either budget wise, did you forget to sign that pay check) or have recently encountered something that it didn’t like (hmm, sent that legion against that keep, the keep fell, but the legion wasn’t worth much after the fact).
-Mobility – how fast they move. Foot, horse, jeep. The faster it moves, the more it cost to maintain.
-Engineering – its ability to cross rivers quickly, lay sieges, and help out your workers in building forts, roads, and other things that need to be done. Engineering costs LOTS of money, but is well worth it. The bigger the number, the more specialists you have, the more things you can do.
-Scouting – this is the ability of your army to accurately detect threats and to assess the enemy. Any yahoo can see that the enemy has a castle up there on the mountain. But a trained scout can tell you that it is either abandoned or that its defenders are in a high state of readiness. Also, is that a company, division or brigade that we are coming up against in those woods?
This gives amazing combinations. You can create an army of fast movers. Good on attack and defense, average on scouting, low on engineering and range, and Excellent in mobility. In ancient times, this would be your horsemen. As your technology progresses, the army upgrades and is now knights. Later on, they trade in their armor and swords for carbines and sabers. Then, even later, they trade up to either helo’s or tanks.
Naval units – well, I am not sure about how this would work. Either something similar to the current method or some hybrid. I don’t know. I have been thinking mostly along the lines of land warfare.
You have two lines. One connects your HQ to your capitol (or, as I would like to see, your state or province capitol that it is assigned to – although this is a different topic really). The next connects your HQ to your army. Each line is a supply and communications line. In order to remove the necessities of extra micromanagement, you can assume that the line has defenders appropriate to the size of the force it is serving. A company has far less than a brigade. However, there are blips that move along these lines that the enemy can intercept. So be warned. You loose your supply wagons, your army is gonna hurt. Or, possibly even worse, you can send information to your enemy about your unit strengths, damage, and so forth. Painful.
The further your HQ line from the capitol, the longer it takes orders to be done (NO MORE INSTANT GRATIFICATION). The longer the HQ line to the army, the longer it takes to get re-supply and the worse your army performs in the field. IF the HQ is attacked and lost (to everybody but yourself, it appears to be just another military unit, if they can see it at all), your army basically just sits there without re-supply until you can build a new one and assign the army to it, and then rebuild the communications lines. Long, expensive, and painful, particularly if your army is in enemy territory.
OK. That is the rough seed for my idea. It guts how things work now but it puts it back into that “epic” scale that we all think Civ should have, while still retaining the ability to micromanage how things work (if you want) as well as allowing for more detailed and realistic warfare. Thanks for reading.
-GK
in addition, you could make having a unit for a certain amount of time give it a bonus (not veterency), say "professional" or "trained", which would simulate those who DIDN'T do stuff like this - for example, America.
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